1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to the imaging processing of cell kinematics in a nucleated cell culture.
2. Description of Related Art
Fluorescence microscopy has become a powerful and popular tool to obtain digital images from live cells, which help cell biologists visualize and analyze kinematics of cells and/or cell clusters. However, to analyze cell kinematics (such as, cell motion, reproduction, diffusion, and attachment), a massive number of time-series images would be taken, and therefore, the interpretation of these data is quite tedious and time-consuming.
The versatility of fluorescence labeling provides pinpoint specificity and the optical sectioning capability of multidimensional fluorescence has advantages of image multidimensionality. Be that as it may, tracking fluorescent cells faces challenges of non-homogenous staining, low signal-to-noise ratio, uneven background illumination, and photobleaching.
To facilitate the analysis, the fluorescence images are often segmented automatically. Nevertheless, the segmented images are usually of low contrast and poor depth resolutions due to the tight packing of cells. In view of this, various techniques or algorithms have been developed for the automatic segmentation. Although these methods may yield the segmentation of cell nuclei in microscopic images, the detection results are often limited in terms of 3D visualization of cells and/or colonies.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need in the related art to provide a method capable of efficiently evaluating the positions, velocities, and states of cell clusters in the time-lapse fluorescence microscopy image.